Stakeholders share wish list ahead of planned citizenship overhaul

OTTAWA — The federal government will table sweeping changes to the Citizenship Act on Thursday and immigration policy analyst Richard Kurland is confident it won’t include a contentious plan to strip the right to citizenship by birth.

While details of the bill have not been released, the government has long indicated a desire to crack down on mothers who travel to Canada to have their babies, thus gifting them automatic citizenship.

“Even though it was posited, suggested, mulled, contemplated, I don’t think it’s going to happen,” said Kurland, a Vancouver immigration lawyer and political adviser, who has lobbied hard against the idea.

The biggest change, he said, will have to do with residency and the number of years it takes for permanent residents to become eligible for citizenship.

Under the current rules, newcomers can apply if they’ve resided in Canada for three out of four years. He expects the government will boost eligibility to four in six years.

In a recent interview with Postmedia News, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander signalled that was definitely on the table.

“I think the balance of considerations is in favour of a longer requirement,” he said. “There’s only one way of truly understanding what it means to be Canadian, what it means to participate in Canadian life, and that is by living here.”

What’s not clear is whether the government will define residency as physical presence in Canada. While not currently the law, it has increasingly become the practice with many applicants receiving a tough residency questionnaire forcing them to account for their whereabouts.

Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada president Yuen Pau Woo fears the government is failing to recognize the value of citizens living abroad and is hopeful, albeit not optimistic, the bill might address the rights of ex-pats. For instance, he said, citizens who have lived abroad for more than five years lose the right to vote. It’s an issue being challenged in court right now and one he’d like the government to reconsider.

“The reality of today’s global talent pool is that highly skilled individuals, including many Canadian citizens, live and work abroad for long periods of time and it is in our interest to do what we can to encourage their attachment to Canada,” he said, in the wake of the residency debate and reports that the government was reconsidering what consular support dual citizens living overseas could expect.

“My hope is that the government will think about Canadians abroad as an asset for Canada rather than just a liability and put in place measures in the new citizenship act that will encourage Canadians abroad to stay attached to Canada rather than just casting them off.”

NDP immigration critic Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe said she’ll be looking for a concrete plan for tackling the citizenship backlog which topped 365,000 last June with some waiting as long as 35 months for their application to be processed.

Earlier this week, the government announced it had made a noteworthy dent in the backlog, doubling to 16,000 the number of citizenship grants doled out in January compared to the same time a year earlier. That said, 2013 was a particularly bad year for those awaiting citizenship. About 129,000 citizenship grants were issued in all of 2013, well below the annual average of 257,000 a year.

With an election coming up in 2015, Kurland said he expects the government will step up naturalization in the hopes newly minted citizens will exercise their new right to vote by voting Conservative.

I cover justice, immigration and public safety issues as part of the Postmedia News politics team. I also keep tabs on what the official Opposition — the NDP — is up to in the House of Commons.
Before... read more coming here I spent several years in Montreal and Toronto with The Canadian Press covering provincial politics and major crime and court stories. I also helped cover the war in Afghanistan from inside and outside the wire.
I previously worked for the Ottawa Sun chasing crime stories and following convicts through the court system.
I love the unpredictability of my job and believe the opportunity to help document history as it unfolds is an awesome privilege that never ceases to give me chills.
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